Analysts say PC gaming is now the one platform where more than 50% of revenue comes from games outside the top 20
According to Newzoo's PC & Console Gaming Report 2026, the long tail keeps getting longer—and in gaming, its longest on PC. "In Western markets," the report states, "titles ranked 21+ grew from 48% to 56% in 2025. More than half of PC revenue in these markets now comes from games outside the Top 20."
As well as buying more games from outside the top 20, we're playing them for longer as well, with playtime for those games up 44% "while total PC playtime grew 14% and Top 20 playtime was effectively flat to slightly down."
Titles benefitting most from this continued interest in games beyond the new hotness include "durable catalogue games like Cyberpunk 2077, Elden Ring, and Skyrim" but also a lot of survival games and action RPGs—two genres where ongoing support, updates, and balancing keep players involved for longer. Rust, DayZ, and Path of Exile 2 are among the games benefiting most from continued interest.
Meanwhile, on PlayStation those catalogue games "still compete directly with annualized sports franchises, which continue to absorb meaningful playtime even below the top tier." When PlayStation players do dive back into older games it's overwhelmingly the prestige games that launched as exclusives, like God of War Ragnarök, Ghost of Tsushima, Spider-Man 2, and The Last of Us Part 2.
The Xbox, on the other hand, has cemented itself as the Game Pass machine, with playtime corresponding to whether something's currently available on the subscription service or not. New free-to-play games count for "Less than 1% of playtime" on Xbox, presumably because they're seen as a distraction from a Game Pass backlog you've already paid for.
Back when the concept of the long tail was popularized by Chris Anderson in Wired over 20 years ago, PC gaming was one of the markets he called out as being well-placed to benefit from it. "Retro gaming, including simulators of classic game consoles that run on modern PCs," he wrote, "is a growing phenomenon driven by the nostalgia of the first joystick generation."
But while Skyrim and DayZ are old enough to qualify as retro, the recent past is also continuing to draw interest beyond the point where it used to. Newzoo highlights games including REPO and Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 among those still selling consistently even though they've dropped out of the bestseller lists. Where there used to be a perilous drop on the far side of new and trending, there's an even bigger audience than there used to be waiting for sales or just enough free time to check out the games that were big a year or so ago.
As Tianyi Gu, manager of market analysis at Newzoo, put it, "On PC, the space below the Top 20 is becoming more economically meaningful. That doesn't make the market unconcentrated, but it does make games below the very top more commercially relevant than before."
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